Doctors and Distillers by Camper English

Author:Camper English [English, Camper]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

WHITE RUSSIAN

51 ounce (30 ml) coffee liqueur

1 ounce (30 ml) cream

Pour the vodka and coffee liqueur over ice in a rocks glass. Top with cream and give it a gentle stir.

Rum

Sugarcane juice and molasses (rum can be made from either) were possibly distilled in India in the centuries around the start of the Common Era, according to archaeological findings, as discussed in chapter 2. That’s over fifteen hundred years before distilling came to the Western Hemisphere, the part of the world with which we most associate the spirit. Sugarcane cultivation spread over the centuries via the trade routes westward from its native Asia and India into the Middle East, then to the Arab-controlled regions of Sicily and Spain. It was transplanted to Madeira and the Canary Islands, and from there to the New World with Columbus and others.

Distillation of sugarcane probably did not follow the same path. Cane had been planted in Europe when distillation technology was available, but there isn’t much evidence that molasses, the by-product of sugar production, was distilled on the continent. It is generally assumed that the stills used in Brazil, the dominant New World sugar provider in the 1500s, came from Europe. However, it is possible that the Portuguese took a shortcut and brought stills or knowledge of distillation from India directly to the New World, but so far that remains only an enticing theory.

In any case, in the 1600s, the British, Dutch, and French all established Caribbean sugar plantations and expanded quickly. The sugar industry grew in the Caribbean as well as in Brazil, with Barbados and later Jamaica particularly profitable islands for the British. Molasses supplemented animal and human food and was used in various ways including as mortar. Then as part of standard operations, a still would be employed on plantations to produce rum from molasses combined with the “skimmings” of the boiled sugarcane juice in the early days. The rum was consumed by laborers as “a booster, a medicine, a salve to the pains of toil,” as writer Dave Broom put it.

The people toiling were enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples, and to a much lesser extent European indentured servants. Slavery was not new to the world and was not limited to sugar and rum production in the Caribbean. But the enormous demand for sugar combined with racism and imperialism resulted in a huge expansion of slavery. By the time the abhorrent practice was abolished in the Americas, more than ten million people were taken from Africa across the Atlantic.

After slavery was abolished, new labor forces particularly from India and China willing to work for the promise of a better life were recruited to sugarcane-growing areas. Today, while working conditions have improved over the centuries since cane was first harvested, laborers in sugarcane fields can still endure unsafe conditions for subsistence wages. In recent decades, an epidemic of chronic kidney disease among sugarcane cutters in Central America has been reported, believed to be due to dehydration, exposure to air pollutants from burnt sugarcane, and other factors.

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